From Rwanda to London, with a Bicycle

You can’t drive to the Gasthaus Spinas, a Swiss alpine lodge that sits about sixty-five hundred feet above sea level in the mountains above St. Moritz. Guests generally arrive by horse-drawn cart, or on foot. When Adrien Niyonshuti moved into the Gasthaus, a few weeks ago, he pedalled there on his mountain bike. Niyonshuti comes from Rwanda, and he was on his way to London, and it’s only a slight metaphorical stretch to say that he was making the entire journey by bike.

Ten years ago, when he was fifteen, he entered a single-speed bike race in his hometown of Rwamagana, and won. His trophy was a radio, but his real prize was the discovery of an all-consuming passion for cycling, and five years ago, when the American cyclist Jock Boyer came to Rwanda to train a bike team, Adrien was in the first draft. In 2009, he moved to South Africa as the first Rwandan ever to be signed on by an international professional cycling team: MTN Qhubeka. The next year, when the African Continental Championship races were held in Rwanda, I was there, writing about Team Rwanda for the magazine. The winners of the race would qualify for the Olympics—this was Adrien’s dream—but as he stood up from his saddle to make an attack in the final laps of the race, his chain broke, and the minutes that cost him were unrecoverable. At lunch, a few hours later, he was in surprisingly good spirits. “I have one more chance,” he said. That chance was a mountain-bike race in South Africa in 2011. To qualify as an Olympian, Adrien had to come in fourth place, and he did. Yesterday he flew from Switzerland, where he has been training, to London, where he will carry the Rwandan flag into the Olympic stadium at tonight’s opening ceremony.

From his base in Switzerland, where he made the Gasthaus Spinas his training camp, Adrien has been racing in recent weeks with the top mountain bikers in the world, and holding his own. One day, between official races, his coach and mentor, Jock, offered to take him on. Adrien tried to laugh him off, but Jock persisted. Years ago, Jock was the first American to ride in the Tour de France, and although he spends more time on a motorbike these days (he recently rode alone from Khartoum to Kigali, by way of Addis Ababa, a trip of more than four thousand kilometres, in nine days) he can still—in his mid-fifties—hammer the pedals with impressive power. But, to be sporting, Adrien gave Jock a ten-minute head start, a substantial advantage in a roughly ninety-minute race. Then Adrien set out after him, and finished five minutes ahead of him.

Most of Adrien’s family was killed in the Rwandan genocide, in 1994, and he told me cycling helps him keep traumatic memories at bay—that he rides to forget. At the same time, his perseverance reflects an absolute refusal to identify as a victim. “On the mountain bike,” he told me, “I can show myself really.” Still, nobody expects him to win when he races in London, on August 12th. His triumph is to be there. “He’s in a really good place right now,” Jock told me over the phone from London this morning. “He’s laughing a lot. There’s quite a lot of media and press surrounding him at all times. He’s going through this epic moment in his life, and he’s still just incredulous, just shaking his head, very quiet, but with real sparkle and laughter in his eyes.” He is already thinking about fulfilling his next dream: to ride in the Tour of France. And Jock said, “He’s here in London thinking about what he represents to the kids of Rwanda—as that figure, that image, that they can see and say, Yeah, if he can do that I do it, too, whatever it is. It’s not about getting a medal, it’s about being that person.”

Photograph by Dominic Nahr/Magnum. See more of Nahr’s photographs of Team Rwanda at Photo Booth.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995 and a staff writer since 1997.